Willie Brown, Future Blues Part One

This is the first post (in a series of three) dedicated to the lyrics of Willie Brown’s Future Blues. I won’t say no more about the author. I’ll only analyse the first two verses and hope you’ll enjoy listening to the song.
Willie Brown’s Future Blues is about the woman he loves (jist git in love en de blues will come). It’s a blues about love and uncertainty. The way of expressing love is common and quite formal, but the subtle variations on the uncertainty theme are remarkable.
The first verse is a formularic phrase that stresses the bluesman’s confusion and fears:

Cain’t tell mah future, honey, I cain’t tell mah past
Cain’t tell my future, honey, I cain’t tell mah past
Lord, it seems like ev’ry minute sho’ gonna be mah last.

Usually, blues scholars are inclined to believe that such formulae express a general attitude of feeling rootless in African-American communities during the slavery time (which was to become acute during the seggregation). The interdiction of speaking their native African languages, the interdiction of performing African rituals (such as ancestors’ cult), or the slave owners’ systematic practice of building ethnically different groups are seen as the most important factors in slaves’ identity loss (and also in the construction of a new identity, based on religion and it’s promise of salvation). Lacking their past (ethnical as well as individual), the slaves also lacked their future, as they were incessantly in dager of being lended, sold or killed.
When Willie Brown uses this formula, he might suggest that he is an “errant soul” seeking for a place to settle down. Or the best place to settle down is a woman’s house. Looking at the Black woman as to a pillar of stabilty may be a cultural cliché, but it’s a cliché that I found in many bluesmen’s testimonials, anthropological papers or even contemporary movies about Black commnunities promoting the family idea. So let’s keep this in mind while reading the rest of the song.
The second verse consists in two formularic verses, very commun in the Delta blues; the first one is exstensively used by Son House:

De minutes seems like hours, en’ hours seems like days
De minutes seems like hours, en’ hours seems like days
En’ it seems like mah woman oughta stop her low-down way.

The theme of slow-passing time is recurrent in the blues history, and its roots are undoubtfully very deep. The Black slaves, for instance, used to sing “Go down, ole Hannah”, an invocation to the Sun, who (for he was a diety) was conjured to hasten his set, so his worshipers finally got their rest. When asked why they were singing while working, the Parchman Farm prisoners answered that singing made them feel the time was passing faster. Well, I suppose this is rather a White projection, cause White folks don’t really understand how music can be a way of life and not only a pastime.In the bare Delta blues tradition, times stops especially by night, when the bluesman thinks about his baby and the way she treats him so unkind.
When the time stops, the bluesman’s mind “gets to ramblin’” (Robert Johnson) “like a wild geese from the west” (Skip James), and he can’t “make his rest”. And this is the blues.
In a deeper sense, the feeling that the time is passing to slow is a symptom of the chronical lack of free agency. It’s a dramatical “prison blues”, a kind of “archetypal” state of mind which originated a variety of blues metaphors (“fast woman”, “easy rider”, “key to the highway”, the Jesse James imagery, you name it). Well, I think this is a very important issue and I’d be glad if you cared keeping it in mind all the way to the end of this blues adventure.
The third line of the verse makes clear what caused Willie Brown’s blues, namely the “low-down way” of his woman. This is a generic expression describing an unacceptable behavior (from a masculin point of view). A woman’s way is low-down either when sh’s flirting with the bluesman’s best friend, or when she refuses to respond to his loved in a “proper” manner.
OK, I’ma little tired right now, and feel like playing. I’ll end this first part here with the promise come up with the sequels in the next few hours. Til then, you can enjoy the Future Blues:

http://www.document-records.com/mp3/21663.mp3

All the credits for the song go to Document Records.

PS A final “word” about the symbol Jesse James, the baddest man. As you might expect, gavagai particularly enjoys this John Lee Hooker song (Bad like Jesse James).